Commercial vehicles are subjected to a variety of vehicle applications and are required to operate in a wide range of environmental and load conditions. For example, some commercial vehicles, such as tractor-trailers, are required to travel long distances over highways with few stops and are subjected to high heat in desert areas and steep grades in mountainous areas. Other commercial vehicles, such as delivery trucks, operate within a city and/or associated suburban area and perform multiple starts and stops each day. These commercial vehicles each have a drivetrain that must be able to operate in a variety of applications under high loads and over a wide range of environmental conditions.
Commercial vehicle drivetrains include components such as an engine, transmission, transfer case, driveline, drive axle, differential assembly, and inter-axle differential assembly, for example. During vehicle operation, any one of these components could experience conditions that could lead toward early failure due to shock loads, fatigue, overload, and/or overheating. Often these conditions result in excessive wheel spin, which is caused by low surface friction, excessive input torque, lack of inter-axle and differential axle locks, excessive operating temperatures, and/or poor driving techniques. Excessive wheel spin can result in permanent damage to one or more drivetrain components.
It is often difficult to distinguish between component failures caused by component quality issues, or failures caused by vehicle application or driver abuse. One solution to avoid component failures for certain vehicle applications has been to over-specify components. This means that because there is a high risk of abuse in certain applications, heavier and more durable components are used instead of lighter components, which under normal usage would be sufficient. This increases the overall cost of the drivetrain and also adversely affects fuel economy due to the heavier weight.
It would be beneficial to provide a drivetrain protection and management system that would identify and correct wheel slip conditions as well as monitoring and storing vehicle characteristic data over time to better understand causes of drivetrain component failures.